Family struggles to find closure after daughter’s unsolved shooting death

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Kathy Brown waits for family members to arrive as she sits at her daughter’s gravesite at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, November 23, 2014. Melody Brewer’s 2000 San Pedro homicide remains unsolved. (Photo by Scott Varley, Daily Breeze)

Kathy Brown's daughters, Melissa, left, and Melody, right, with Melody's daughter Alyssa. Melody was murdered in San Pedro and the killer has not been caught. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker/Los Angeles Daily News)

She is her mother, after all, and moms just don’t forget things about their children. Forgetting is for the unimportant stuff: where she watched the Super Bowl a few years ago, the address of a first apartment. Not her daughter’s first word after “ma-ma” or “da-da.” Her first day of cheerleading. The way she’d playfully tease her as a teenager by singing that song over desperate pleas for a ride to the mall.

But wait, what was that silly song? It feels like it’s there. It should be. And what was she wearing exactly as she rolled her eyes? She favored boots, but it could’ve been the knee-high socks she liked as well. The memory is unfocused without those details. Kathy Brown closes her eyes. Searching for the pieces feels like sticking an arm into the darkness of a bush looking for what was lost. Grasping blindly. Coming up empty.

The 59-year-old sighs. She wishes she could ask her daughter what that song was. Or was she 15 or 16 that time in the kitchen, driving her child crazy singing that stupid tune? She wishes she could ask her a lot of things. Just once. Just for a moment.

Because she’s Melody Brewer’s mom, and Brown vowed on the day her daughter was killed 15 years ago that she’d keep her memory alive. Everything. Because who else knew her better? She’s her mom.

But it was a long time ago, and Brown fears she’s failing that promise now.

“It bothers me that I can kind of remember the moment, but I can’t remember the song, and it’s something I always did,” Brown said. “It bothers me that these things are fading away, and I feel like her memory will be lost along with mine.”

She’s quiet for a moment. The song remained elusive.

An unforgettable day

Los Angeles police detectives said Melody Brewer was never believed to be the intended target of the Jan. 31, 2000, homicide in San Pedro.

It was late at night, almost midnight, and the 17-year-old was in the house baking cookies, dressed in a black shirt, gray sweatpants and still sporting her false fingernails — purple this time. Brown was sleeping in the next room. Brewer’s 1-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was in the crib inside the teen’s recently painted black room with glowing stars on the ceiling. Brown said her daughter had gotten into the Alyssa Milano show “Charmed” and the room reflected the new sensibility. But not entirely devoted to the witch-based drama, she’d also decorated the room with ’60s-style pinwheel art and loved hip-hop music.

The day had already been an eventful one on the news, and Melissa Brewer, her older sister who was three months pregnant, had been paying attention to the big story that day: the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 off the coast of Oxnard. It had killed 88. She watched newscasts of boats desperately searching for survivors.

“I remember thinking how horrible it was for those people,” Melissa said.

Melissa was in bed at her home around midnight when she got a call from her brother. Sleepy, she didn’t think he was making sense. The words “Melody” and “shot” and “dead” were like some sort of weird word jumble. Her brother, Michael Brewer, had been at the house and told her to get there immediately.

Her boyfriend drove her. She saw the street busy with people and the eerie glow of red sirens casting their strange shadows. She had to show identification to get near the house. She saw her mom, Kathy Brown, sobbing on the lawn.

Brown has no trouble remembering that night. It’s odd to her that the things she wants to remember sometimes fade while things she’d like to forget come with unblinking clarity.

The gunshots woke her instantly. She flew out of the house, but her son was already outside. He blocked her from getting to Melody’s body sitting in the passenger seat of a Chevy Camaro. Brown screamed for her. Pounded on her son’s chest, begging him to let her past so she could see her. She cried hard as her legs weakened and she collapsed to the ground.

LAPD Detective Paul Inabu said he and another detective assigned to the case gelled quickly around the idea of a gang-related hit. They knew a man had walked up to the car and sprayed it with bullets. The man sitting in the driver’s seat wasn’t struck by a single round. But Brewer took nine shots to her body. The girl Inabu believed was the intended target was 22-year-old Cher Mitchell, who was standing next to the Camaro and had gang ties and a rap sheet. She died at the scene, too.

Mitchell was outside the Brewer house at the time. She had had a relationship with Michael Brewer, but it was unclear what the status of that relationship was. There was a phone call to the house. It was intended for Mitchell. Melody brought the phone out to her, not Michael. Inabu said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was the first double-homicide of Inabu’s career, and he remembered the sheer number of bullet casings at the scene. He said the detectives knew quickly Brewer was an innocent bystander. Mitchell had the gang ties. They even thought they might have a good bead on who pulled the trigger.

But during the investigation, witnesses clammed up. The driver who saw the whole thing was uncooperative. After a few months, Inabu said the case stalled. Now 15 years later, the case has moved to LAPD Detective Mike Whalen’s unsolved murder files. But Inabu has never forgotten the scene and the grief that sent Melody’s mom to the ground in tears that night.

“The parents aren’t supposed to outlive their kids,” Inabu said. “That just makes it so hard.”

Melody Brewer’s family is still struggling. Michael Brewer doesn’t want to talk about it. Melissa Brewer will but is rueful about what might have been for her sister, who would be 31 now. Melody’s father, a musician who named her for the Marshall Tucker Band song “Melody Ann,” won’t speak of it.

Brown said she knows it is still affecting her. She’s been raising Alyssa with her second husband at their ranch-style house in Phelan. Brown should be a grandmother to Alyssa, but has settled into being a mom with Melody gone. Alyssa calls her mom. Brown sometimes confuses memories of Alyssa growing up with Melody’s childhood.

But the forgetting and the confusing don’t take away the missing of Melody. And she finds she still can get angry at the person who did it.

“That was my daughter he took from me,” Brown said. “He is a horrible person.”

Remembering

The photos of what was lost on Jan. 31, 2000, show a girl with long hair and a slight smile. When put next to Alyssa Brewer’s picture, the resemblances are in the nose and chin. And the long hair. Pretty much always long hair.

Alyssa never really knew her mom. They aren’t similar in a lot of ways. Melody loved animals, especially horses, but never had a chance to ride much at all. Alyssa could take or leave horses but is an accomplished rider with a box full of medals and ribbons collecting dust in Brown’s home in the high desert — a place so remote that, at night, a coyote’s howl actually means something. Alyssa said she looks forward to living in a big city.

Melody struggled in school but was set to graduate from high school the year she was killed. Brown said her daughter’s career path fluctuated among different interests and included a familiar refrain: Marry a rich guy. Melissa said Melody’s last ambition before she died was to become a licensed massage therapist.

Alyssa is an honors student with designs on going to the Air Force Academy and becoming a profiler for the FBI. Alyssa is a cheerleader at Serrano High School and is good enough that she was asked, though declined, to be a team captain. Melody was a cheerleader for one year and stopped.

But this is one of the key tragedies about Melody’s death that gnaws at Melissa.

As the older sister, her memories are replete with sibling resentment and endless bickering and fighting. She was eight years older than Melody, so she got stuck baby-sitting her often and had to endure Melody stealing her clothes. It’s that lack of connection that happens when kids pass through different stages in life so far apart in age. That’s where Melissa pauses and thinks how unfair it is that Melody’s life would be judged by where she was at 17.

“I feel like she never got the opportunity to grow into being who she was going to be,” she said. “I wouldn’t want people to judge me based on where I was at 17. I don’t think most people would.”

She keeps pictures of her and her sister around the house and at her office. There’s a silly one of the two of them on a trip to San Francisco that is a favorite. She remembers her sister crawling up a shelf to get ice cream in the kitchen. She longs for a sister now to talk to and share parenting stories with as 39- and 31-year-old mothers.

She also feels guilt. She loved her sister but didn’t always show it.

“I wish I had maybe tried to guide her more,” Melissa said. “Maybe tried to help her more.”

Time alone

Walking up Resurrection Slope was never easy for Brown, and in recent years the aging knees have made the hike a little tougher.

Still, she lurched forward, clutching two blankets and a purse. When she finally stopped, Brown looked down at the flat gravestone and spoke to her daughter.

Melissa and her daughter Melody, named for her slain sister, would arrive shortly. So would Alyssa and a friend.

But right now, this was Brown’s time alone with Mel, the name she’d called her from the beginning. Mel, who had always told her she was afraid to be buried underground, and so Brown made sure she had her favorite stuffed Eeyore animal with her.

“Hi, Mel. It’s a beautiful day here today. I’m glad I could spend it with you. I love and miss you so much and think of you every day,” she said. “I’m sure you’re watching from heaven and can see what an awesome daughter you have and are as proud of her as I am.”

She knelt down and rubbed her hand over the stenciled words, “Our Beloved Mel.”

For a few more minutes it was quiet. Then the rest of the family trundled up the slope and laid blankets down. They started to talk about their lives and share memories.

Brown then looked at Alyssa.

“Can you play that song she really liked?” Brown asked. “Do you have it on your phone? It’s that song by Blaque called ‘Bring It All to Me.’ ”

Alyssa scrolled through the playlist and found it.

The music began playing through the tinny speaker. The family listened. Brown bobbed her head and sang along. This time, she remembered.